The Complete Poems

  Lets fish eat from her palm;

  Has founded villages, planted groves

  And hollowed valleys for brooks running

  Cool to a land-locked bay.

  I never dared question my love

  About the government of her queendom

  Or its geography,

  Nor followed her between those birches,

  Setting one leg astride the gate,

  Spying into the mist.

  Yet she has pledged me, when I die,

  A lodge beneath her private palace

  In a level clearing of the wood

  Where gentians grow and gillyflowers

  And sometimes we may meet.

  SELDOM YET NOW

  Seldom yet now: the quality

  Of this fierce love between us –

  Seldom the encounter,

  The presence always,

  Free of oath or promise.

  And if we were not so

  But birds of similar plumage caged

  In the peace of every day,

  Would we still conjure wildfire up

  From common earth, as now?

  TO MYRTO OF MYRTLES

  Goddess of Midsummer, how late

  You let me understand

  My lines of head, life, fate

  And heart: a broad M brand

  Inerasable from either hand.

  ANCHISES TO APHRODITE

  Your sceptre awes me, Aphrodite,

  The knot-of-wisdom in your grasp.

  Though you have deigned my couch to warm

  And my firm neck in love to clasp,

  How am I more than a man-lion

  To you a goddess, the world’s queen?

  Ten thousand champions of your choice

  Are gone as if they had not been.

  Yet while you grant me power to stem

  The tide’s unalterable flow,

  Enroyalled I await your pleasure

  And starve if you would have it so.

  A LOST WORLD

  ‘Dear love, why should you weep

  For time’s remorseless way?

  Though today die in sleep

  And be called yesterday,

  We love, we stay.’

  ‘I weep for days that died

  With former love that shone

  On a world true and wide

  Before this newer one

  Which yours shines on.’

  ‘Is this world not as true

  As that one ever was

  Which now has fled from you

  Like shadows from the grass

  When the clouds pass?’

  ‘Yet for that would I weep

  Kindly, before we kiss:

  Love has a faith to keep

  With past felicities

  That weep for this.’

  THE DANGEROUS GIFT

  Were I to cut my hand

  On that sharp knife you gave me

  (That dangerous knife, your beauty),

  I should know what to do:

  Bandage the wound myself

  And hide the blood from you.

  A murderous knife it is,

  As often you have warned me:

  For if I looked for pity

  Or tried a wheedling note

  Either I must restore it

  Or turn it on my throat.

  SURGICAL WARD: MEN

  Something occurred after the operation

  To scare the surgeons (though no fault of theirs),

  Whose reassurance did not fool me long.

  Beyond the shy, concerned faces of nurses

  A single white-hot eye, focusing on me,

  Forced sweat in rivers down from scalp to belly.

  I whistled, gasped or sang, with blanching knuckles

  Clutched at my bed-grip almost till it cracked:

  Too proud, still, to let loose Bedlamite screeches

  And bring the charge-nurse scuttling down the aisle

  With morphia-needle leveled…

  Lady Morphia –

  Her scorpion kiss and dark gyrating dreams –

  She in mistrust of whom I dared out-dare,

  Two minutes longer than seemed possible,

  Pain, that unpurposed, matchless elemental

  Stronger than fear or grief, stranger than love.

  NIGHTFALL AT TWENTY THOUSAND FEET

  A black wall from the east, toppling, arches the tall sky over

  To drown what innocent pale western lights yet cover

  Cloud banks of expired sunset; so goodbye, sweet day!

  From earliest green you sprang, in green tenderly glide away…

  Had I never noticed, on watch before at a humbler height,

  That crowding through dawn’s gate come night and dead of night?

  THE SIMPLETON

  To be defrauded often of large sums,

  A whole year’s income, even,

  By friends trusted so long and perfectly

  He never thought to ask receipts from them:

  Such had been his misfortune.

  He did not undervalue money, sighed for

  Those banknotes, warm in the breast pocket,

  For want of which his plans were baulked;

  But could not claim that any man had left him

  In complete poverty.

  Easier to choke back resentment,

  Never to sue them, never pit in court

  His unsupported oath against theirs;

  Easier not to change a forsworn friend

  For a sworn enemy.

  Easier, too, to scoff at legal safeguards,

  Promissories on pale-blue foolscap

  Sealed, signed, delivered before witnesses.

  What legal safeguard had a full wallet

  Carried among a crowd?

  But though he preened himself on calmly

  Cancelling irrecoverable debts,

  It vexed him not to know

  Why all his oldest, dearest friends conspired

  To pluck him like a fowl.

  TWO RHYMES ABOUT FATE AND MONEY

  ‘Neighbour, neighbour, don’t forget:

  Thirty shillings due tomorrow!’

  Fate and mammon rule us yet,

  In the midst of life we are in debt,

  Here to pay and gone to borrow.

  How and why

  Poets die,

  That’s a dismal tale:

  Some take a spill

  On Guinea Hill,

  Some drown in ale,

  Some get lost

  At sea, or crossed

  In love with cruel witches,

  But some attain

  Long life and reign

  Like Popes among their riches.

  THE TWO WITCHES

  O sixteen hundred and ninety-one,

  Never was year so well begun,

  Backsy-forsy and inside out,

  The best of years to ballad about.

  On the first fine day of January

  I ran to my sweetheart Margery

  And tossed her over the roof so far

  That down she fell like a shooting star.

  But when we two had frolicked and kissed

  She clapped her fingers about my wrist

  And tossed me over the chimney stack,

  And danced on me till my bones did crack.

  Then, when she had laboured to ease my pain,

  We sat by the stile of Robin’s Lane,

  She in a hare and I in a toad

  And puffed at the clouds till merry they glowed.

  We spelled our loves until close of day.

  I wished her good-night and walked away,

  But she put out a tongue that was long and red

  And swallowed me down like a crumb of bread.

  BURN IT!

  Fetch your book here.

  That you have fought with it for half a year

  (Christmas till May)

  Not intermittently but night and day

  Need but enhance yo
ur satisfaction

  In swift and wholesome action.

  Write off the expense

  Of stationery against experience,

  And salvage no small beauties or half-lines.

  You took the wrong turn, disregarded signs

  Winking along your track,

  Until too close-committed to turn back.

  Fetch the book here

  And burn it without fear,

  Grateful at least that, having gone so far,

  You still know what truth is and where you are,

  With better things to say

  In your own bold, unmarketable way.

  SONG: COME, ENJOY YOUR SUNDAY!

  Into your outstretched hands come pouring

  Gifts by the cornucopiaful –

  What else is lacking?

  Come, enjoy your Sunday

  While yet you may!

  Cease from unnecessary labours,

  Saunter into the green world stretching far,

  Light a long cigar,

  Come, enjoy your Sunday

  While yet you may!

  What more, what more? You fended off disaster

  In a long war, never acknowledging

  Any man as master;

  Come, enjoy your Sunday

  While yet you may!

  Are you afraid of death? But death is nothing:

  The leaden seal set on a filled flask.

  If it be life you ask,

  Come, enjoy your Sunday

  While yet you may!

  On a warm sand dune now, sprawling at ease

  With little in mind, learn to despise the sea’s

  Unhuman restlessness:

  Come, enjoy your Sunday

  While yet you may!

  From Collected Poems 1961

  (1961)

  RUBY AND AMETHYST

  Two women: one as good as bread,

  Bound to a sturdy husband.

  Two women: one as rare as myrrh,

  Bound only to herself.

  Two women: one as good as bread,

  Faithful to every promise.

  Two women: one as rare as myrrh,

  Who never pledges faith.

  The one a flawless ruby wears

  But with such innocent pleasure

  A stranger’s eye might think it glass

  And take no closer look.

  Two women: one as good as bread,

  The noblest of the city.

  Two women: one as rare as myrrh,

  Who needs no public praise.

  The pale rose-amethyst on her breast

  Has such a garden in it

  Your eye could trespass there for hours,

  And wonder, and be lost.

  About her head a swallow wheels

  Nor ever breaks the circuit:

  Glory and awe of womanhood

  Still undeclared to man.

  Two women: one as good as bread,

  Resistant to all weathers.

  Two women: one as rare as myrrh,

  Her weather still her own.

  From The More Deserving Cases

  (1962)

  THE MILLER’S MAN

  The imperturbable miller’s man

  Whose help the boy implored, drowning,

  Drifting slowly past the mill,

  Was a stout swimmer, yet would not come between

  The river-god and his assured victim.

  Soon he, too, swimming in the sun,

  Is caught with cramp; and the boy’s ghost

  Jeers from the reeds and rushes.

  But he drowns valiantly in silence,

  This being no one’s business but his own.

  Let us not reckon the miller’s man

  With Judas or with Jesus,

  But with the cattle, who endure all weathers,

  Or with the mill-wheel foolishly creaking,

  Incurious of the grain in the bins.

  JULY 24TH

  July the twenty-fourth, a day

  Heavy with clouds that would not spill

  On the disconsolate earth.

  Across the road in docile chorus

  School-children raised their morning hymn to God

  Who still forgot their names and their petitions.

  ‘What an age to be born in!’ cried old Jamboree.

  ‘Two world wars in one generation!’

  ‘However,’ said I, ‘the plum crop should be heavy!’

  What was the glass doing? The glass was low.

  The Germans claimed to have stormed the town of Rostov.

  Sweden dismissed the claim as premature.

  Not a single painter left in the neighbourhood –

  All were repainting ruined Exeter.

  We had no earthly right to grumble… No?

  I was reading a book about bone artifacts

  In the age of the elk or woolly rhinoceros.

  Already, it seems, man had a high culture.

  A clerk wrote from the Ministry of Labour

  To ask what reasons (if any) would prevent me

  From serving in the Devonshire Home Guard.

  Soon the Americans would be here: the patter

  Of their rubber heels sounding like summer rain.

  So pleasantly passed my forty-seventh birthday.

  SAFE RECEIPT OF A CENSORED LETTER

  As the war lengthened, the mail shrank:

  And now the Military Censor’s clerk

  Caught up with correspondence twelve months old –

  But letters in a foreign language waited

  Five months more.

  ‘Time,’ he said, ‘is the best Censor:

  Secret movements of troops and guns, even,

  Become historical, cease to concern.

  These uninterpretable items may be

  Passed at last.’

  Your letter was among the favoured –

  Dateless familiar gossip of the village.

  Thus you (who died a year ago) succeed,

  Old rogue, in circumventing a more rigid

  Censorship.

  From New Poems 1962

  (1962)

  RECOGNITION

  When on the cliffs we met, by chance,

  I startled at your quiet voice

  And watched the swallows round you dance

  Like children that had made a choice.

  Simple it was, as I stood there,

  To penetrate the mask you wore,

  Your secret lineage to declare

  And your lost dignities restore.

  Yet thus I earned a poet’s fee

  So far out-distancing desire

  That swallows yell in rage at me

  As who would set their world on fire.

  THE WATCH

  Since the night in which you stole

  Like a phantom to my bed,

  Seized my throat and from it wrung

  Vows that could not be unsaid,

  Here beneath my arching ribs

  Red-hot embers, primed to be

  Blown upon by winds of love,

  Scorch away mortality.

  Like sledgehammers my two fists,

  My broad forehead grim with pride,

  Muscles corded on my calves

  And my frame gigantified.

  Yet your watching for an hour

  That our mutual stars will bless

  Proves you more entranced than I

  Who go parched in hope of less.

  NAME DAY

  Tears of delight that on my name-day

  She gave me nothing, and in return

  Accepted every gift I heaped upon her –

  Call me the richest poet alive!

  UNCALENDARED LOVE

  The first name cut on a rock, a King’s,

  Marked the beginning of time’s annals;

  And each new year would recapitulate

  The unkind sloughings and renewals

  Of the death-serpent’s chequered coat.

  But you with me together,
together, together,

  Survive ordeals never before endured:

  We snatch the quill out of Enoch’s hand

  To obliterate our names from his black scroll –

  Twin absentees of time.

  Ours is uncalendared love, whole life,

  As long or brief as befalls. Alone, together,

  Recalling little, prophesying less,

  We watch the serpent, crushed by your bare heel,

  Rainbow his scales in a deathward agony.

  THE MEETING

  We, two elementals, woman and man,

  Approached each other from far away:

  I on the lower wind, she on the upper.

  And the faith with which we came invested

  By the blind thousands of our twin worlds

  Formed thunder clouds about us.

  Never such uproar as when we met,

  Nor such forked lightning; rain in a cataract

  Tumbled on deserts dry these thousand years.

  What of the meteorologists?

  They said nothing, turned their faces away,

  Let the event pass unrecorded.

  And what of us? We also said nothing.

  Is it not the height of silent humour

  To cause an unknown change in the earth’s climate?

  LACK

  Born from ignoble stock on a day of dearth

  He tramps the roads, trailing his withered branch,

  And grudges every beauty of the wide earth.

  Lack is his name, and although in gentleness

  You set him honourably at the high table

  And load his plate with luxury of excess,

  Crying: ‘Eat well, brother, and drink your fill’,

  Yet with hunger whetted only, he boasts aloud:

  ‘I have never begged a favour, nor ever will!’

  His clothes are sad, but a burly wretch is he,

  Of lustreless look, slack mouth, a borrowed wit,

  And a sigh that would charm the song-bird from her tree.

  Now he casts his eye in greed upon your demesne

  With open mockery of a heart so open

  It dares this gallows-climber to entertain.

  NOT AT HOME

  Her house loomed at the end of a Berkshire lane,

  Tall but retired. She was expecting me;

  And I approached with light heart and quick tread,

  Having already seen from the garden gate